Tag Archives: Wisdom

In the ethical monotheism of late Judaism and early Christianity, Yahweh (originally a minor warrior deity of a small federation of habiru tribes in the region of Sinai who eventually became the creator of heaven and earth) was regarded as the supreme judge over the destiny of human beings. He demanded exclusive worship and absolute obedience from his devotees, in exchange for which he provided them with protection and a prosperous life.

The “fear of the Lord” – not living in abject terror of god but with reverent awareness of his watchful supervision – was thus an acknowledgment of the human being’s accountability as a moral agent before the One whose will is the Way of all things.

This fusion of human moral accountability and the omnipotent will of god would create numerous crises for believers over the centuries. From the Babylonian invasion and exile of 586 BCE, through the calamitous failure of Jesus’ revolution, to the twentieth-century holocaust (or Shoah) in which millions of Jews and other faithful were killed, the contradiction in believing that a benevolent deity is in control as innocent human beings suffer has driven many once-devoted theists to abandon their belief in god.

For as long as theism regarded deities as personified agencies of cosmic and natural forces, human suffering could be chalked up to fate – “That’s just the way it is.” But after the Bible’s ethical monotheism elevated the will of god above everything else, a crisis was just a matter of time.

Try as we might to uphold divine sovereignty by making human beings somehow deserving of their suffering (e.g., an individual’s unconfessed sin, inherited guilt from previous generations, or the total depravity of human nature); or on the other side, by appealing to god’s inscrutable plan, the soul-therapy of pain and loss, or adjusting the mixer board of orthodoxy so that god’s righteousness is bumped above his compassion – all of this compromise to our ethical and rational sensibilities has put belief in god’s existence out of the question for many.

Does this leave us with atheism then? It sounds like we need to drop all this nonsense and move on. Haven’t we disproved god’s existence by now, tolerated the logical and moral contradictions, or at least gone long enough without evidence to support the claim? If theism has ruined its credit in our modern minds, isn’t atheism all that’s left?

A good part of this blog is dedicated to clarifying a different conclusion. Just because many of us are no longer able – more importantly we aren’t willing – to sacrifice intellect for faith doesn’t necessarily mean that theism has to be trashed, or that it’s been fatally exposed as a farce.

It could also mean that theism has done its job.

For a time when we were young (so runs my argument) we depended on higher powers to help us feel secure, supervise our development, and exemplify the character virtues that promote cooperation and goodwill. Every family system is a kind of theism where taller powers provide for underlings in these and other ways, and they in turn try to be obedient and respectful of parental authority.

The fear of the Lord was continually in our awareness of being accountable for our words, choices, and behavior. Doing good came back in praise and reward; doing bad called down blame and punishment. If our taller powers were involved and diligent, we eventually came to understand that ‘the world’ (our household) was an interdependent system where our actions had consequences – not just for us alone but for the system as a whole.

In ancient and traditional societies this world model of a household was projected outward onto a larger – in the case of Judaism’s ethical monotheism, a cosmic – scale, where a patron deity (like Yahweh) was imagined as watching over his children, demanding their obedience, and providing for their needs. Such a model of reality gave assurance that the tribe and its individual members weren’t orphans adrift in an indifferent or hostile universe.

Their god personified a provident intention in the greater cosmos, but s/he also reminded them that human beings are part of something larger and owe their contribution to the whole. No action went unnoticed by god; later, Jesus would insist that not even our thoughts and desires are hidden from “the father who sees in secret.” Humans are one big sibling society under the will of the fatherly Yahweh, and each of us is accountable to him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

We realize now as never before that our representations of ultimate reality are metaphorical constructions that not only assist our contemplation of what is beyond name and form but also serve to link the business of daily life to a transcendent center of value and meaning. Yahweh is a mythic character, a literary figure, a theological construct who personified the provident mystery of reality as superintendent over nature and all nations.

While it is the case that Bible stories tell of Yahweh’s great accomplishment “in the beginning,” his intervention on behalf of Hebrew slaves, his guidance and support of refugees through the wilderness, his revelation of laws by which to govern the community, his ventriloquism through the prophets, his incarnation in Jesus, the fertilization of a new community by his spirit, his orchestration of the missionary church, and the preparation currently underway for the apocalyptic final curtain – we commonly overlook the fact that all of this takes place inside the imaginarium of myth.

Because biblical (or more accurately, mythological) literalists are considering these stories from a standpoint outside this imaginarium – which names a mode of consciousness that is shaped and fully immersed in its own narrative constructions of meaning – the veracity of Yahweh’s character for them must be a function of his separate existence, apart from the stories themselves. In other words, these are not mere stories (certainly not myths!) but eye-witness reports of actual supernatural facts and miraculous events.

It was this loss of the mythic imagination which motivated the conviction that would eventually set the stage for theism’s disproof by science.

We could have gone the route of seeing through the myths as metaphorical representations of reality, and as mythopoetic (rather than scientific) constructions of meaning. In that case, theism might have taken the role of orienting human consciousness in reality, providing mystical grounding and moral guidance in the formation of identity, and then assisted the further transformation of consciousness by facilitating its liberation from ego in a transpersonal re-orientation to life within the turning unity of all things. The pernicious divisions of soul and body, self and other, human and nature would have been transcended and healed, lifting us into a conscious experience of community, wholeness, fulfillment, and wellbeing.

But things went in a different direction.

Now, on the other side of our sacred stories (seeing through them rather than seeing by them) and taking up our lives after god (post-theism), we still have an opportunity to embrace that ancient proverb: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. For us, however, it’s not about living under the watchful, provident, and retributive supervision of a god. We can save the kernel of its wisdom and release the husk of theism that protected it for millenniums.

It’s not that we should live in such a way that pleases god the father and motivates his blessing in return. The personified character of god in the myths was only the ‘husk’ inside of which the precious insight was honored and kept – the insight that we are not getting away with anything.

We are accountable. Our beliefs, values, and actions affect much more than we know, for we belong to a larger living system. What we do locally amplifies in its effects to impact global conditions, which in turn nourish, limit, or undermine our local quality of life.

Not only are we not ‘getting away’ from this situation by some escape route to a perfect world (a utopian future or heavenly paradise), the integral intelligence of systemic feedback that is our planet and its cosmic environment will continue to bring back to us the consequences of our daily choices. And as we can see with the effects of industrial pollution and global warming, these consequences are now crossing a critical threshold.

What we sow in our inner life (soul) comes out as health or illness in our body. What we do to others (as Jesus pointed out, especially our enemies) comes back on our self. The degree or lack of reverence and care that we demonstrate for the household of nature reflects the dignity we affirm our deny in our own human species. All is one, and we’re all in this together.

In Spirituality Basics: The Human Condition I explored our situation as it comes together (or perhaps rather, falls apart) around the delusion of a separate identity known as ego. Insofar as our ego is insecure and driven by ambition to resolve or compensate for this insecurity in various ways, we end up in an even more neurotic mess. Our off-center and out-of-joint human condition is only aggravated the more (and longer) we insist on making everything about us, when who we are (as distinct from what we are) is merely a social pretense anyway.

At the end of that post I anticipated the moment when

The delusion of our separate self gradually lightens into a general illusion of separateness, and this veil finally falls away before the revelation that All is One.

Such a realization is the prized moment in spirituality, where the illusion of our separation from this, that, and the rest, as a necessary part of establishing a unique center of personal identity (ego), is transcended and we are suddenly disillusioned – or from the other side, reality is suddenly revealed (unveiled) to us as a vibrant Whole. This, and not the rescue project of getting the sin-sick soul safely to heaven after we die, is our true liberation.

In the present post we will step into the picture just prior to this breakthrough realization, where we can also see it within the larger context of our existence. As my returning reader knows already, my point will not be that ego must be prevented from its conceit of having a separate identity, but that the project must be encouraged to the point where ego is sufficiently strong (stable, balanced, and unified) to be transcended. Otherwise, to the degree that we lack these markers of ego strength, we will be unable to get over ourselves and plug in to a larger experience.

My diagram illustrates a simplified version of the Wheel of Fortune – that backgrounding model of reality appreciated in so many, especially premodern, cultures. The Wheel has long been a way of unifying space and time, origin and destiny, human and nature, inner and outer, self and other, life and death. Cultural myths were draped over its frame to provide orientation, inspiration, and guidance to human beings on their journey.

When modernity cut the moorings of tradition and “superstition,” it not only emancipated the mind from archaic beliefs, but deprived it as well of this treasury of higher wisdom which we are ever so slowly rediscovering. Time will tell if we can recover it fast enough, and then take it to heart, before we destroy ourselves as a species.

At the center of the Wheel is our individual existence, self-conscious in all its egoic glory. Much time, effort, and tribal investment has gone into the work of getting us to this point. Even before we come to self-awareness as a person – referring to the mask of identity that we put on and act out – we have already joined what the Chinese call “the ten thousand things,” where every individual is on its own trajectory from beginning to end. All together we are the universe, the turning unity of all things; and all together, but each in our own way, we are on a course to extinction.

The aspect of reality into which all things eventually dissolve is named the Abyss. It is the dark chaos of pure potentiality as theorized by science, and the primordial dragon containing the energies of creation as depicted in the myths of religion, opened up by the s/word of a god and giving birth to the cosmic order.

The great Wheel of Fortune turns, then, with each of us rising into existence – literally “standing out” on our own – and soon enough (or is it simultaneously?) passing away. It’s this passing-away part that ego struggles with, of course, since it seems to suggest that not only our houseplants but our loved ones, every last attachment, and we ourselves are impermanent. Many of us are motivated to grip down on our identity project, which compels a dissociation from the mortal body and a willful disregard (ignórance) of our better angels.

So here we are, spinning neurotically off-center – except that it seems normal since everyone’s doing it – and estranged from our essential nature. The message of spirituality at this point is that we don’t have to stay in this condition, trying desperately to hold it all together while inwardly knowing it won’t last. It is at this moment of vulnerability that the veil of illusion stands its best chance of parting in disillusionment, where the present mystery of reality shines through and we really see for the first time.

And what do we see? That our individuality is but an outcropping of a much profounder mystery that descends past our personality and through our nervous system; into the rolling rhythms of our life as an organism, and still deeper along the crystalline lattices of matter; finally opening out, dropping away, and coming to rest in the boundless presence of being-itself.

Any of us can take this inward path to the Beyond-Within, but each must go alone.

The wonderful thing is that once we let go of who we think we are, our descent into solitude removes, one by one, the veils of separation where aloneness has any meaning at all. We realize at last that everything belongs, we are all in this together, and that All is One. In this way, our descent into solitude is simultaneously an ascent into the experience of communion.

What we name the universe, or the turning unity of all things, is therefore the outward manifestation of this self-same grounding mystery within. Our own personality, a unique expression of desire, feeling, thought, and behavior – along with all its peculiar quirks and idiosyncrasies – is what the universe is doing right now.

But it’s not all the universe is doing, and everything doesn’t turn around us. Finding our place in the present mystery of reality is what spirituality is all about. We can now live the liberated life.

For a while now I’ve been working towards a unified theory of human development that doesn’t merely annex spirituality onto one of the conventional models, but rather affirms it as essential to what we are. To do this successfully I’ve had to draw clear distinctions between spirituality and religion, between healthy religion and pathological forms of religion, between religion oriented on a separate deity (theism) and its evolutionary breakthrough to the liberated life on the other side of god (post-theism).

Because deformities and perversions in religion are so common these days, we can easily get caught in the trap of analyzing the problem. Psychotherapy and the mental health industry have fallen into this trap, to the point where diagnosing disorders and designing treatment plans (talk therapy, drug therapy) around the goal of managing or eliminating symptoms leaves undefined exactly what mental order might be.

What is it to be a healthy, happy, and fully self-actualized human being, and how can we get there? As far as spirituality is concerned, the answer must go beyond tinkering with religion and trying to fix its pathologies.

What we need is a positive and comprehensive model that can shed light on where we are now, as well as show us the opportunities and challenges of the path ahead. Such a vision of the possible human should inspire each of us to dig deeper, reach higher, and give ourselves fully to what we can yet become. I believe I have such a model; see what you think.

Given that human beings came on the scene just a second before midnight in the 14-billion-year-long ‘day’ of our universe, we need to move quickly through all the important events that preceded us and made our arrival possible. The graphic on the right should be read from the bottom-up, which will guide our ascent through the distinct epochs and organizational stages of the universe.

The first and all-encompassing epoch/stage is energy, which transformed next into matter, and then provided the conditions for life (organic) to emerge. Each step in this process defined a smaller horizon of existence, so that the quantum field of energy contains everything else, the atoms and nuclear forces of matter are within that, whereas cells and living things represent a much, much smaller horizon inside matter.

It was billions of years before the organic horizon of living things on Earth incubated a further transformation, in the evolution of sentient life. Sentience refers to the capacity for sensation, awareness, perception, and suffering which is most developed in the animal kingdom. By virtue of possessing nervous systems with some form of central ganglion (leading eventually to brains), sentient creatures also have the ability (in relative degrees) to adapt their behavior in response to the environment. In short, they can learn.

Later still, the family of primates acquired an additional power as an epiphenomenon of sentience, enabling them to be self aware. In our own species this virtue of self-awareness would reach its climax in ego formation, where an individual is not only sensitive and responsive to the environment and reflexively aware of his or her subjective experience, but psychosocially occupies a separate center of personal identity.

Healthy ego development establishes the personality on a stable nervous state, in what I call positive embodiment. Here self-awareness feels ‘at home’, centered and grounded in the vital rhythms of the body. A coherent nervous state oscillates around a baseline of calm, responding appropriately and adaptively to situations as they arise while maintaining composure. A base of stability, then, provides for the emotional balance of mental health.

These are the provident conditions that give rise to a unified sense of self. Altogether the three traits of a stable state, balanced mood, and an executive center of identity comprise what is known as ego strength.

But our story isn’t finished here, even though this is where many of us stop or get stuck. Despite the fact that conventional society and religion (particularly theism) are organized around personal identity and ego needs, self-awareness is still only a stage. The question remains about a likely evolutionary intention behind the formation of a separate center of identity.

A young child impersonates her parents (taller powers), personifies reality with imaginary playmates and the characters of storyland, and is supported in the habit of personalizing her world and taking things personally – all for what? The culture might say: For no other reason or higher purpose than becoming the center of everything, a dedicated consumer looking for happiness in the next purchase or next attachment, and blessed assurance for the life to come.

As a stage, however, and not only a curious innovation of sentient life, egoic self-awareness represents a critical breakpoint – a threshold and not a final destination.

The spiritual wisdom traditions, and now increasingly some secular “fourth force” schools of psychology (after behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and humanist paradigms), regard ego consciousness as a new point of departure – assuming, of course, the provision of adequate ego strength.

Roger Walsh & Frances Vaughan (1993) define the transpersonal as “experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos.” Whereas the separate ego generates a worldview where body and soul, self and other, human and nature are divided and frequently in conflict, there is a way to reconcile such divisions and become whole again.

A healthy ego makes it possible for the individual to break from the bondage of “me and mine,” to be liberated from the consensus trance of society and religion, and to enjoy the flower and fulfillment of life. Inwardly consciousness drops away from the ego center, into the nervous system and organic processes of the body, both of which of course lie below the threshold of self-conscious personal identity.

By such a meditative descent, the individual ceases to experience him- or herself as an individual at all, but surrenders more completely to the grounding mystery of being itself.

As this transpersonal path inward and downward breaks through deeper centers, their corresponding outward horizons are transcended as well. By outward leaps, consciousness ascends past the boundary of ego concerns and farther out to include all sentient beings, all living things, the material cosmos, and the whole of reality. At this level of awareness, the turning unity that we casually name the universe is experienced – not just imagined or conceived – as our home.

Such is the breakthrough realization that has inspired an enlightened ethic in various periods and places around the planet, promoting genuine community: We’re all in this together.

Healthy ego formation, then, makes possible the experience of a new reality beyond the limiting horizon of “me and mine,” by the transpersonal breakthrough beyond ego.

The grounding mystery of no-thing and the turning unity of all things are two aspects (inner and outer) of what I call the present mystery of reality.

Spiritual intelligence (SQ) reconnects consciousness to its ground and home after a long and complicated adventure into identity. The symbols, stories, rituals, and rites of passage that facilitate this adventure to its intended fulfillment constitute the essence of religion (from the Latin religare, to link back, reconcile, or reconnect).

The present mystery of reality is now more than just a concept in the mind, and has become a transpersonal experience of boundless presence. But neither is this an end in itself, for now the real work of genuine community can begin. Now that we have gotten over ourselves, nothing more stands in the way.

We know for a fact that the pesticides we spray on our crops end up in our grocery stores. We know that rampant consumerism is unraveling the delicate web of life on our planet. We know that collateral losses of civilian casualties make wars criminally unjust. We know that teaching students what to think and not how to think is sterilizing their innate curiosity and creativity. And we know that exploiting the time and labor of our working class is eroding society from within.

But we do these things anyway.

When we go ahead and do something that we know is damaging the living systems we depend on for health, happiness, and a better future, we are demonstrating a willful disregard for the greater good. Alan Watts called it ignórance – where the accent signifies a deliberate intent to act (or not act) when we are fully aware that the consequences are (or will be) detrimental to the well-being of others and even of ourselves.

Genuine ignorance is when we don’t know what we need to know. Ignórance is knowing what we need to know but acting as if we don’t.

And yet, it must also be that something essential – some critical degree of understanding – is absent from the active knowledge set informing our way of life. Maybe this missing element is less about a comprehension of facts than an intuition of something else. I’m using intuition here as referring to understanding gained by direct insight rather than through a discursive process of logical reasoning or drawing inferences from available facts. To see into something means to grasp its inner essence or its place in some greater whole. Such intuition is spontaneous, and the insight it brings typically changes how we see everything else as well.

Our age is unprecedented for the amount of knowledge we possess – or at least for the amount of information we have access to. We can get facts on just about anything by searching the cloud with a smart phone. Whereas not long ago our questions would have stirred curiosity and wonder, maybe inspiring us to imagine what the answer might be or do some research ourselves, today we can get 160,000,000 search results in less than a second. 160,000,000! Who really needs to think anymore?

We’re at a place, however, where our ignórance is sending us, together with the entire planet, to the brink of disaster. Toxic chemicals in our food are switching the genetic code of our bodies and programming them to self-destruct. Byproducts of consumerism are choking the atmosphere, poisoning rivers and oceans, burning rich topsoil into sand, melting the ice caps, swamping seashores, and disrupting global weather patterns. Standardized testing and the industry of turning students into graduates has turned many students into depressed failures instead.

We haven’t been doing these things forever, but it’s as if we can’t not do them now since the landslide of consequences is moving too fast to jump off.

Behind our ignórance are convictions, beliefs about ourselves, others, and the nature of reality that are so closed and rigid as to hold our minds hostage. Something inside us knows that these cramped quarters are far too limited to contain the whole truth, not to mention what can’t even be rendered in language because it’s too fluid, dynamic, and impossible to pin down. But we’ve already made the agreement to trade away our access to reality for the security that convictions promise. The problem is that they can’t deliver on this promise, and no matter how tight and small our convictions become, the insecurity persists.

My diagram illustrates the four strands of human intelligence, what I name our Quadratic Intelligence. These strands come online during distinct critical periods, with physical (VQ) development leading the way, followed closely by the awakening of emotional (EQ) and then, later on, intellectual intelligence (RQ). A fourth strand of spiritual intelligence (SQ) is held open as a possibility, but depending on how things go at earlier stages, many of us may never enjoy the inner peace, creative freedom, and higher wisdom it makes possible. The reason for this will help us get beneath our convictions – which, remember, lie (sic) behind our ignórance.

The first challenge of existence was for our nervous system to match our external conditions with an internal state. A safe, stimulating, and resource-rich environment was matched with an internal state of security, confidence, and curiosity. Conversely, a harmful or resource-deprived environment was matched with an internal state of anxiety, which made our nervous system reactive and hypervigilant. This match of internal state to external conditions is all about calibrating sensitivity and motivating behavior that is adaptive. Anxiety motivates avoidance behavior, reducing exposure to danger and risk, which is nature’s way of helping us stay alive.

When the nervous system is set at higher levels of insecurity (i.e., anxiety) we tend to be overly sensitive to signs of threat. What might otherwise be a display of normal behavior in another individual is misperceived as guile, pretense, or aggression. An adaptive response in this case would be mistrust and suspicion, keeping distance and always ready to head for the exit.

For obvious reasons, an anxious nervous state severely affects the early development of emotional intelligence. We tried to manage our insecurity by clinging to things and people that made us feel safe, pushing away what was unfamiliar and different.

The above diagram depicts an in-turning spiral between the physical nervous system and our emotional intelligence, sucking the psychic energy of consciousness off its intended upward path and into a strangling vortex of insecurity. In some cases the anxiety can be so intense that we are sure our extinction is imminent. But most of us are just insecure enough to work hard at keeping our attachments close by.

So what happens when a large portion of our energy and attention is tied up in the things, people, and life arrangements that help us manage our deeper insecurity? The answer is that we form strong beliefs around them. Beliefs so strong, in fact, as to prevent us from thinking outside the box. Thinking is concrete, binary (either/or), and inflexible, crimping down on latent abilities for abstraction, paradoxical (both/and), and inclusive thought.

But then, in order to carry on with our mind in its box of convictions, we have to learn how to willfully disregard all evidence, logic, and common sense which suggests that what we’re doing is causing harm, or at least is counterproductive to what, deepest down, we really want for ourselves, our children, and the human future.

The universe is a great Web of Life. You might argue that because so much of it is uninhabitable (dead rocks and nuclear furnaces) we should keep our discussion on the topic of life focused solely on our home planet. But we must remember that Earth is itself a product of the Universal Process which began some 14 billion years ago, and even if our planet was the only place where life exists across the entire 96 billion-light-year diameter of the observable cosmos, we are logically bound to the conclusion that the universe is alive. And conscious. And holding this thought, right now.

The Web of Life, then, extends out into the cosmic surround, includes the whole earth, the vibrant system of living things called nature, and your body as an organismic member of this system. Your body can’t survive apart from the support of nature, nature can’t continue without the favorable conditions of Earth, the earth wouldn’t exist had not the universal process conspired in the way it did for our planet to get formed and flung around its home star.

You may feel separate and all alone at times, but that’s something else, not your body.

I have placed you in the above diagram, nestled in the Web of Life as an embodied and natural earthling, a child of the cosmos and latter-day descendant of stars. For now we’ll focus on the purple figure outlined in black, ignoring everything behind you and to the right. Black is my color code for your animal nature, which is extroverted in its orientation to the environment (nature, Earth, cosmos) as you reach out for the shelter, resources, and connections you need to live.

Purple represents your inner awareness, oriented inwardly to the grounding mystery of consciousness. Also called the Ground of Being, it is how our provident universe is experienced from within, so to speak, in the uplift of existence. This grounding mystery of being can only be found within as you detach attention from the sensory-physical realm and allow awareness to drop past “mine” (property and attributes), “me” (the felt object of self), and “I” (the center of personal identity), into the deep and timeless present.

Consciousness has no object at this point. Ground is merely a metaphor reflecting the experience of mystery as both source and support of existence in this moment.

This duality of outer and inner orientations of consciousness, one through the body and out to the Web of Life, and the other through the soul and deeper into the Ground of Being, is what constitutes your essential self as a human being. You are a human animal (body) with a capacity for contemplating the inner mystery of being (soul). Because your highly evolved brain and nervous system make this dual orientation possible, you and your species may be the only ones with an ability to contemplate your place in the provident universe.

I should be clear that it’s not entirely by virtue of your advanced nervous system that you are able to break past the boundaries of personal identity for a larger (Web) or deeper (Ground) experience of reality. You need a center of personal identity (color coded orange in my diagram) in place to make such transpersonal experiences even possible. We call them transpersonal precisely because they are about going beyond the personal center of identity and its limited frame of reference. The center is who you think you are, and the frame is a construction of meaning where your identity belongs. It is your world.

Things get interesting at this point, and not just a little complicated, since ego formation is not an instinct-driven process, but instead depends on your tribe. The construction of identity and its frame of reference (world) is accomplished over the first three decades of your life. During that time your tribe is selecting or suppressing temperamental predispositions according to its standards of a ‘good boy’ or ‘nice girl’. As time goes on, the incentives for compliance evolve from candy or spankings, to grades, degrees, bonuses, and promotions. The goal is to shape you into “one of us,” someone who belongs, follows directions, and will do anything for the sake of honor.

Even though your personal identity is a social construction, your tribe still had to work with (and on) an animal nature that really doesn’t care very much about rules and expectations. A strong instinct for self-preservation needed to be reconditioned so that you could learn how to share and make sacrifices. Impulses connected to elimination, aggression, and sexual behavior had to be brought under control and put on a proper schedule. The means for accomplishing all of this is called social conditioning, and the primary psycho-mechanism for its success is the ego.

Somehow your constructed identity needed to be sufficiently separated from the animal urgencies of your body, but without losing the tether to your embodied essential self.

This is where, in the deeper cultural history of our species, religion progressed out of animism and into theism. The higher power of a patron deity not only served to give supernatural sanction to tribal morality, but it functioned also as a literary role-model. I say ‘literary’ because patron deities live only in the storytelling imagination (aka mythology). Every deity is a kind of personality construct, a literary invention and projected ideal reflecting back to the tribe those character traits and virtues which the community aspires to emulate. In exchange for their worship, sacrifice, and obedience, the patron deity bestows favors and rewards (e.g., success in childbirth, bountiful harvests, increases in wealth, and beatitude in the next life).

If we look closely at the patron deities of name-brand religions today, we can identify three qualities common to them all. Underneath and behind the tribe-specific virtues, its devotees honor their deity as immortal, supreme, and absolute. In the pictorial language of myth these translate into a depiction of the deity as separate, above, and outside the ordinary world of everyday concerns.

An even closer look will reveal these qualities as the driving aspirations of ego as well.

In the need to establish a separate center of personal identity, ego must first be differentiated from the body. Because the body is mortal, ego must be – or aspire to become – immortal. Notice that the ego’s status with respect to the body is ‘not’ (im-) mortal, a simple negation without any meaningful content. In addition to being separate from the body, ego takes its position above the body (the literal root meaning of the word ‘supreme’) and manages things from up there. Finally, as a final move of separation, ego begins to regard itself as essentially independent and outside the realm of bodily concerns – just like the deity.

According to my theory of post-theism, the intended outcome of theism is the internalization of the patron deity’s ‘godly virtues’, to the point where its projected ideal is no longer needed. The individual assumes creative authority in his or her life, taking responsibility for modeling the virtues of maturity, ego strength, and community interest. This is especially important to up-and-coming theists (the younger generation), who need taller powers to show them how to be and what to do.

Throughout this very fascinating game we can’t forget your essential self. The construct of identity can now serve in the transpersonal experiences of empathy, communion, and wholeness. If we can survive ego’s pursuit of immortal glory, these are the promise of our human future.

In my previous post The Four Ages of Life I offered a model for understanding spirituality as a deeply interior experience that evolves through the lifespan. The entire arc progresses – or more commonly, meanders – through Four Ages, different in duration but organized in such a way that each one builds on those before it, carrying forward also their shortfalls and incorporating them into the developing whole. A stage model is nothing new, but as far as I know the specific themes that I associate with the Four Ages comprise a unique theoretical arrangement.

By following the progress of spirituality – instead of, say, physical maturity, emotional, intellectual, or ethical development – I am also hoping that this scheme of Four Ages of Life will open a constructive dialogue on the topic of religion. I’ve made a case elsewhere, and many times, that religion should not be identified only with the organized brands evident around us (Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc.).

As a system of utilities (stories, values, practices and beliefs) which connects us to the grounding mystery within, to others in community, and to the turning mystery of our universe, religion is everywhere. But most importantly it’s how you put it all together. You may borrow from the tradition, mythology, and symbols of a name-brand world religion (or more than one), but however you keep the concerns of existence, meaning, and daily life aligned together in a working system is your religion.

Another application of my Four Ages model has to do with that gold standard of transpersonal psychology known as self-actualization (A. Maslow). The conventional understanding of self-actualization regards it as a rather distant goal of psychological development, where the fulfillment of lower needs (survival, safety, belonging, and self-esteem) provide conditions for a breakthrough beyond the limited experience and perspective of ego.

The fact that self-actualization is defined as the salient marker of transpersonal consciousness restricts its meaningful application to that point (and beyond) where an ego is securely in place, since ‘going beyond’ (trans) the personal presupposes a separate center of identity as the person we are.

Instead of a later-in-life achievement, self-actualization could be measured as the degree in which an individual is realizing his or her human capacity at each Age of Life. In addition to a transpersonal variety, then, we can also give attention to pre-personal self-actualization – achievements in the progress of spirituality that precede the formation of a personal identity. In that case, a young child might be self-actualized not in terms of wisdom but of faith.

And not only pre-personal, but even personal modes of consciousness could be interpreted according to whether and what degree one’s ego facilitates the realization of his or her human capacity at that time in life.

The above diagram pulls forward the lifespan arc model of my previous post, but with an important change. Besides conceiving the different Ages of Life in terms of chronological periods of time, each Age is depicted as a circle (or cycle) turning continuously in its own phase space. In other words, even after you have become an adult and are building out the meaning of your life, the dynamic of Faith continues to turn deeper below. Just because the critical period for a trusting release to reality is behind you doesn’t mean that the primary concern of that Age of Life isn’t continuing to affect everything about your adult engagement with reality now.

In the same way, each previous Age of Life continues to shape the development of spirituality over the lifespan.

You should notice a purple meandering line coursing across the Four Ages, making for a less schematic trajectory than the arc in the background. If you follow the meandering line, you’ll notice that its forward progress moves through alternating clockwise and counterclockwise revolutions of the Ages themselves. This is meant to suggest that, while progress is propelled by a gearing-together of our four themes (faith, passion, reason, and wisdom), it is possible for us to lose forward momentum and get ‘stuck’ inside the centripetal spin of one or another.

We’re back to the example where insufficient faith in reality keeps us obsessing over concerns around security and trust. So, even though our chronological age indicates where we perhaps ought to be in terms of our developing spirituality, complications and difficulties earlier in life can persist in holding us captive.

This allows the model to be individualized according to our unique path through life. More free-moving here, a little hung up there. Advancing toward self-actualization in this aspect, but somewhat impeded in another. If we use a simple value metric such as 1=low, 2=moderate, and 3=high to identify our degree of self-actualization in each of the Four Ages, we end up with a series of numbers (e.g., 2-3-2-1) that represents our “self-actualization profile.” The purpose would not be to compare ourselves with others, but rather to bring to light where our human journey to fulfillment needs creative attention.

It could be that traumatic events or inhospitable conditions of life early on got us hung up with anxiety over whether reality is resourceful, responsive, or reliable in any profound sense. A low value here would likely interfere with our self-actualization in subsequent Ages of Life. An insecure and defensive juvenile ego might completely eclipse a transpersonal intuition of oneness beyond the construct of identity in our later years (Age of Wisdom).

I’ve argued that the obsession in some forms of theism with glorifying the (divine) ego and saving the (human) ego from extinction actually prevents the progress of spirituality in those religions from our soul’s true destiny, which is to release ourselves to the present mystery of reality. Despite such teachings in the tradition regarding the necessity of dropping the illusion of a separate self or dying to our seed-form so that the fullness of life can spring forth, a persistent concern with personal identity and what we deserve only intensifies the conceit and strengthens the illusion.

Obviously it’s rather shortsighted to lay all the blame for our ego fixations at the doorstep of dysfunctional theism. An entire society, from religion to politics, from art to morality, from commercial interests to domestic initiatives, from its management of resources and consumption of goods to its disposal of toxins and waste, can be caught in the delusion of ego-grandiosity.

The human journey begins in the uplift of a provident mystery, comes to unique expression in our personal aspirations, and finally passes through the veil of meaning where All is One.

There are a lot of highly concerned and rational people today who are being held back from stepping out, speaking up, and taking the lead into a better future for our planet. It’s not exactly that someone else is holding them back, even though that’s how many would try to rationalize their current situation. We’d like to think there is someone over there who is keeping us in our frozen state, and that if only they will leave us alone we will be happy.

This turns out to be little more than an excuse, however, because the real cause of our paralysis is internal to ourselves, not out there somewhere else.

I propose the existence of something I’ll call “the fear chain,” which gets forged especially during those critical years of our early conditioning. Parents, teachers, coaches, and other handlers conspired in teaching us that certain things (and people) are dangerous – or potentially so. When we were very young we were cautioned against talking with strangers – along with playing in the street, running with scissors, and touching hot stoves. Such things were “dangerous,” and engaging with them would likely put us at significant risk.

Whether or not they consciously realized it, these influential adults were servo-mechanisms in our socialization, whereby the animal nature of our body was trained to behave according to the rules and rhythms of cultural life. Already programmed by millions of years of evolution, our body came equipped with some basic instincts, the most persistent of which is our drive for self-preservation.

In some form or fashion, all the other instincts – for attachment, food, shelter, sex, and reproductive success – are variations of our primal commitment to staying alive.

This drive to stay alive might also be characterized as an innate fear of death, of avoiding or seeking escape from anything that threatens survival – particularly predators, venom, toxins and tainted food; along with genuinely high-risk situations of exposure, violence, or unstable and precarious environments. While not as primal, perhaps, anything that represented the possibility of injury was linked to our fear of death, since, if serious enough, an injury might very well result in our loss of life.

In this linking fashion, numerous secondary associations were forged and anchored to our compulsive need to live – and not die.

Such association-by-linking should make you think of links in a chain, and this is exactly how I am proposing that the fear chain comes into existence. A primal (and mostly unconscious) fear of death got linked out to situations, objects, and other people who presented a risk of injury to us. And just like that, the primitive energy dedicated to staying alive was channeled into attitudes and behaviors of avoidance, suspicion, and self-defense. From that point on, the possibility of injury started to drive what we did, where we went, and with whom.

This concept of a fear chain suggests that the paralysis many people feel today is a complication of how we have been socialized – not just when we were children but even now under the tutelage of the politicians, preachers, journalists, and jihadists who spin our collective perceptions of reality. In this case, those deeper fears of injury and death get linked to the more normal experiences of loss.

Almost as much as we fear losing our lives or losing our minds, we dread the loss of wealth and opportunity, of time and freedom, of the way we were, or what we thought we could accomplish and become.

Socialization is largely dedicated to the project of constructing our identity – not what we are as human beings, but who we are as members of cultures, nations, classes, and tribes. This project is carried out through a process of forming attachments to the people, places, things, and beliefs that define us and form our horizon of meaning. Identity and attachment, then, are simply two sides of the same coin, with one (identity) the product of the other (attachment).

If we return to our natural and socially conditioned fear of injury, we can see how threats to our attachments amount to a kind of assault on our person. This is how the fear chain is forged with still another link: the (threatened or real) loss of an attachment is experienced as an injury to our identity, which anchors still farther down into our instinctual fear of death.

The stronger the attachment – that is, the more central it is to who (we think) we are – the more we fear losing it.

I wonder if the fragile construct of our identity – so many attachments, so much dependency – is what makes us so afraid of failure these days; of not being ‘successful’ or ‘good enough’. If we should try but fail, we run the risk of losing some aspect of who (we think) we are, suffering injury to our personal identity and (we irrationally believe) putting ourselves in peril of death itself. When a desired outcome isn’t achieved or we can’t get something perfect the first (or fiftieth) time, who we are and our place in the world is called into question. It’s best not to try, which allows us to keep the fantasy of identity safely above and ahead of us without the risk of being proven wrong.

Those who seek to generate an anxious urgency in us will typically use a narrative of terror to motivate us in the direction they want us to go. Such rhetoric is common from fundamentalist pulpits and during political campaigns, not to mention from those extremist wack jobs who seek to panic, disrupt, and destroy the life routines of innocent citizens. They are all united in their determination to unsettle us, tapping our amygdalas with messages of panic, outrage, and paralysis – the flight, fight and freeze responses hardwired into our brain circuitry.

For the relatively disengaged citizenry of liberal democracies, freezing is the majority option: we stop, stare, hold our breath and shake our heads, waiting for the stupor to pass before crawling back into our rut of life-as-usual.

My theory is that these narratives of terror are the sociocultural counterpart of the fear chain, one shaping the environment of our collective life and the other priming our nervous system for survival in ‘dangerous’ times. Even though a drive to survive and the fear of death may be instinctual, our chronic anxiety over losing ourselves – of losing who (we think) we are, along with the illusion of security and control that holds us together – is entirely conditioned and not natural at all.

Indeed, the intentional release of this bundle of nerves and dogmatic convictions is the Path of Liberation as taught in the wisdom traditions of higher culture.

The question remains as to how we might effectively transform our Age of Anxiety into a Kindom (sic) of Peace, where we love and honor the whole community of life on Earth. Years ago Paul Tillich coined “the courage to be” as the high calling of our human adventure. In defiance of the narratives of terror and breaking free of the fear chain, we can step out and speak up, investing our creative authority in the New Reality we want to see.

It will take more than just a few brave souls. And it will require that we move out of complacency, through protest, into a very different narrative.